Bulk tagging existing content in Drupal with Views Tagger

If you have your own Drupal site for a while, and you want to add or update the tags of your content, you have to edit every single node and update the tags by hand. This is a rather tedious job.

Fortunately you don't have to hack the Drupal database to tag your content en masse: the Views Tagger module leverages the Views module and provides a dedicated view to tag all your nodes at once.

The Views Tagger view is accessible as a new tab in admin/content/node: the short link to it is admin/content/node/tagger. A pager will show 10 node teasers at a time. As you can see in the screenshot, just edit the tags and hit the ‘Update’ button: and you're all set!

The Views Tagger module will gracefully take care of duplicate new tags, and you can remove tags from a post as well. It was a life saver for me

Once you have installed the Views Tagger module, this view is automatically enabled for every visitor on your site, which probably is not what you want. Here's what you have to do:

1. Edit the Views Tagger view by visiting admin/build/views/edit/tagger.
2. In the ‘Basic settings’ block, click on the ‘Access’ field. You can choose between no access control (unrestricted access, default), permisison-based, or role-based access control.
3. On my Drupal platform I defined an ‘administrator’ role specifically for administrative tasks. Thus I select ‘Role’ to enable role-based access control, then I hit the‘Update’ button.
4. The next dialog presents a list of roles. Tick the role(s) that may use this view. On my platform I ticked the ‘administrator’ role and again hit the ‘Update’ button.
   • If this dialog does not appear, just click on the button right to the ‘Access’ field. The role picker dialog will now be rendered.
   Make sure you tick at least one role!
5. Finally, hit the ‘Save’ button to register your changes to the Views Tagger view.
6. Now you can check the access control by logging off and trying to access the view (at admin/content/node/tagger).

There is another more powerful module that in principle should also be able to allow bulk tagging operations: Views Bulk Operations (VBO). However the VBO module requires some extra massaging before it can do its job. In addition, reading the issue queue I had the impression that this module is not yet recommended for playing with tagging. It however still remains a valuable and very powerful administration module.